It ain't pretty, but Kennedy gets job done: Five ways of looking at the TUF Nations Finale

It ain't pretty, but Kennedy gets job done: Five ways of looking at the TUF Nations Finale

It took a full seven hours in front of a relatively sparse Canadian crowd that might have been more interested in playoff hockey than a Wednesday night UFC event, but the TUF Nations Finale is in the books.

A few takeaways from the event, in no particular order.

1. It ain’t pretty, but it’s a win for Kennedy

After his unanimous decision victory over Michael Bisping, Tim Kennedy jumped on the mic to express equal amounts of disappointment in his own performance and admiration for Bisping’s ability to take a punch. If you didn’t know better, you might think it was the post-fight speech of the loser rather than the winner.

Was it a thrilling brawl to cap off the heated fight week exchanges? No, but nobody who knows a thing about these two fighters should have expected such a thing. Kennedy fought smart, Bisping didn’t give him anything easy, and the result was a close, though pretty clear decision win for the American. Afterward there was even something not unlike a reconciliation between the two. Maybe enemies didn’t become friends, but they did achieve a begrudging respect for one another. They just didn’t achieve a spectacular fight to match the intensity of the pre-fight hype.

That’s not something Kennedy should be all that discouraged by, however. He landed several right hands that might have been knockout blows on someone else, but Bisping took them well. He dominated the action on the mat, mostly stymied the Brit’s offense on the feet, and generally did what he had to do. When Chael Sonnen did more or less the same thing in 2012, it was good enough to earn him another crack at Anderson Silva. Kennedy’s not going to get a title shot for this, but he doesn’t need to hang his head either. Bisping’s no easy out. Then again, with this loss he’s no contender, either.

2. If you say hello to your mom during a fight, you’d better finish

Probably the most interesting thing to happen during the two TUF Nations Finale bouts was middleweight Elias Theodorou looking up from an exhausted Sheldon Westcott and uttering an enthusiastic “Hi mom!” into a cageside camera. Disrespectful? Maybe, but it might also be smart. With “TUF” shows popping up like Starbucks franchises, simply winning one season of the UFC’s long-running reality shows isn’t enough anymore.

Sure, you get a “six-figure contract” (sort of), but by the time you get your first post-“TUF” UFC bout there’ll already be new “TUF” darlings ready to seize your spotlight. If you can be the guy who gave a shout-out to his mom during his finale fight, at least that’s something. Some people will want to watch you because they think you have color. Others will just want to see that smirk knocked off your face. Both translate into some degree of interest, and that’s a start. Just remember, it might be only a matter of time before you’re on the other end of that beating, at which point some grizzled UFC vet will be looking into the camera and saying hi to your mom.

3. Poirier has a funny sense of fun, and the UFC had better be glad he does

For Dustin Poirier, trading brain-scramblers with Akira Corrasani seemed like a fine way to spend a Wednesday afternoon. No matter that he was fighting down the ranks in a bout where he had more to lose than gain. He described it as “fun,” even after getting rocked in the first round before turning it around for a second-round TKO finish.

Wonder why the UFC loves guys like Poirier? For starters, he thinks getting knocked around in a risky slugfest is fun. For another, he goes after the finish. He’s a great guy to have in a thriving featherweight division. You can match him up against just about anybody in the weight class, and you know you’re going to get something worth seeing. Whatever the UFC’s paying him, it’s not enough.

4. Smith proves her mettle, but short notice is no way to face Kaufman

Here’s one where we should probably just be glad the bout didn’t get scratched altogether. Sarah Kaufman went through two potential opponents who both dropped out with injuries, only to have Leslie Smith step up at the last minute to save the day. Thing is, by about round two you could definitely tell that she’d taken the fight on extremely short notice, which makes it hard to say what this win means for Kaufman. She beat a fighter she’d already beaten once before, only this time her opponent clearly had a little less in the tank. That’s not a knock on Smith, who fought hard and clearly gave it everything she had. It is, however, the truth. I guess the happy ending here is, Kaufman still got to fight and still got paid. It beats doing all that training for nothing.

5. A long haul for a Wednesday afternoon

I sat down to watch the first prelim fight at about 1:15 pm here in the glorious Mountain time zone (that’s 3:15 for you high-falutin’ East Coasters). A full seven hours later, at slightly past eight o’clock in the evening, the main event finally wrapped up. Again, that’s seven hours to do 13 fights. Mixed in there were promos for the new season of “TUF,” a bizarre retrospective on the institution of “TUF” (it ranks somewhere just behind the moon landing in terms of cultural significance, if you believe the sound bites), and plenty of studio time spent discussing one inane topic or another.

In other words, there was a whole lot of filler, some of which is to be expected on a cable TV fight card, but plenty of which feels like fat that could stand to be trimmed. It’d be one thing if the UFC crammed in all that filler and still managed to finish on time, but it didn’t. If you set your DVR for this one, you probably came home to find that it cut off midway through the third round of the main event. If you backed up from there you saw that the co-main event ended some 40 minutes earlier – plenty of time to cram in a five-round fight (and here’s one main event that we all could’ve guessed would go the distance), if the UFC and FOX Sports had just decided to get on with it.

I get that pacing live events like this, especially in a sport where each bout might take 15 minutes or might end in 15 seconds, is tricky. But sometimes the UFC seems to think its fans have absolutely nothing else going on in their lives. On a week where there’s two TV events in the span of four days, asking fans to spend seven hours watching your product on a Wednesday is essentially the same as telling them to skip most of it. And if you’re the UFC, is that really a habit you want people to get into?